rough honey
by possibilist
Summary: "Your brain gets more tangled: Things get worse before they get better, and you cannot feel your hands." Quinn's struggle with lots and lots of things during her time at Yale, and the people who fight for her to stay, all the breaks and healing that takes place. Faberry, Fabrastings, Quinn-centric. Trigger warning: contains specific discussion of eating disorders and self-harm.


[i feel like this particular piece needs more preface than others: i am not—nor will i ever be—a mental health care professional. i know only the specific experiences i have acutely been through, and even those things are far from being encompassed by words. this piece contains specific discussion of eating disorders and self-harm, and if either of those things could be triggering, please don't read. i promise it's not that great.

secondly, i think if there is an opportune time to say anything like this to people i don't know, it's now: if you are struggling with things you cannot handle on your own, the very bravest, most wonderful and strong thing you can do is ask for help—from friends, from teachers or professors, from a counselor or therapist. you are important and worth it, no matter how impossible healing seems.]

...

rough honey

_._

_When someone asks what it means_

_to "die for love," point_

_here._

—Rumi, "Like This"

...

Things get worse before they get better. Freshman and sophomore year are mainly spent ignoring things: not being able to make it out of bed for class; not being able to look pretty girls in the eye; not be able to feel anything when you let handsome boys fuck you. It's things like making excuses to not exercise—your back is sore; your cough is perpetual. It's heavy bones, a chest scattered with pebbles.

It's not that Santana, that Rachel and some wonderful people you meet at Yale don't care about you: They do, acutely and painfully. This is the main reason you mostly try to ignore things. You are supposed to be better now. You are supposed to be soft and new. You go to _Yale_. You are supposed to be someone entirely different than yourself.

But you discover slowly, painfully, that you are very much unable to escape your marrow, the flecks of gold in your eyes, the lay of the veins pumping under the soft skin of your wrists.

.

You stop eating normal portions of food about the same time you fuck with another girl at Yale. You refuse to call it anything but _fucking _because it is only that: You have no experience with BDSM but you are sure in every minute centimeter of your body that you certainly deserve punishment.

It probably stems back to an issue of you thinking you don't deserve safe words, you don't deserve someone to love the adult softness of your hipbones or the new fullness of your breasts. It's a physical separation, and you'd like to not exist in your body.

.

You eat enough at first for no one to really notice. You have a meal plan, so whenever you go with friends you make a gigantic salad; no one seems to think anything of it.

Maybe you think about it in the back of your mind March of Freshman year when the girl fucking you burns your hip with a cigarette after you tell her to. Maybe you think about it in the back of your mind when you break up with her because you can't stand the smell of your skin when you go to sleep.

.

Coming out isn't as painful as you'd imagined in terms of others' reactions: You're at Yale; Judy has grown enough to not be surprised or angry, even if she seems uncomfortable.

Since you're out and since your chest still splits each time you imagine Rachel with someone else, one night when she's visiting you and you're facing each other in your small dorm bed, you kiss her.

She kisses you back. You think that maybe this is enough sustenance, this is enough to heal you and see you through the nights that seem to be stretching rust-dark into the mornings.

You try your best, you try your very hardest. Rachel cannot understand; you do not understand what your brain seems to be tangling around.

When things end at the beginning of summer after sophomore year, when Rachel cannot bear your thin, famished love any longer, there is too large a part of you that understands why.

.

It isn't until junior year that you start seriously counting and tracking your intake of food.

You begin to take a small journal with you everywhere, and you go from 1000 calories a day, to 800 calories a day, to 400. You're constantly painfully hungry, but your stomach feels far too big. You can't stand the stretch marks on your hips, the spaces between your skin and your ribs.

You buy a razor and try to make yourself smaller. Sometimes when you can't sleep at night you imagine being able to cut your sternum out of your skin.

You don't, but later you suppose it isn't from lack of trying.

.

You're not _void _of love, not exactly. You adore your friends; you have so steadily fallen for poetry and philosophy, for academia. You meet Spencer in a grad seminar you take about the Cold War, and she scoffs under her breath when you speak about Lacanian anxiety.

It's the most interesting love you've known, being with Spencer. She is broken like you but she is healed in ways you cannot quite comprehend. She kisses your old scars; she kisses your new cuts. For months she buys you scar cream.

One day you get drunk by yourself and you call Spencer shakily. Aria is visiting from Amherst for the weekend, but Spencer drags Aria with her to your room, and Spencer holds you while you completely break down.

The next day she goes with you to the Student Health and Counseling Center. You see a counselor for what is supposed to be a free thirty minute consultation, and you end up crying for forty-five minutes while you ramble entirely confusedly about how you don't understand what's happening in your brain and body—you've always felt emotions intensely and physically, and your brain had always been wild with ideas that you often kept to yourself growing up, but now it seems a simultaneous chaotic microcosm inside of you of confusing and painful storms of racing thoughts, dark things, desperately aching chests. You have been through pain and heartache and confusion before, but it was nothing like this.

They refer you immediately to a therapist. You don't speak at all about your lightheadedness or the fact you've not eaten since lunch yesterday, but when you get out of the counselor's office—cried-out, a too-feeling thing—Spencer holds your hand and nods. She tells you that it's going to be okay, that they'll figure things out, that you can get better.

You go on a run later because your body is pounding too much to completely believe her.

.

The first time you purge is in Santana's apartment. You've had too much white wine but you're still lucid enough to know what you're doing, and Santana is dazedly watching some reality show about fish tanks when you go to her bathroom and stick your fingers down your throat.

It's not too effective, because you're on your knees and you don't know yet where your gag reflex is, but it sends a horrible feeling of satisfaction creeping up your spine, into the base of your scull. Your throat _aches_, but you feel stronger than a lot of people, like you can prove yourself so much more.

Santana squints at you when you come out of the bathroom. She wants to know if you're going to puke on her couch or if you got it all out.

You tell her that you're fine now.

.

You purge in your dorm carefully, but you do learn: Stand up, place toilet paper on the surface of the water, drink at least twenty-four ounces after eating anything. You purge consistently after most meals, even though your caloric intake is under 500 calories a day.

You take up far too much space in the world, even if Spencer loves you deeply, even if you have all of the talent and intelligence in the world.

Despite your best efforts, you cannot bring yourself to understand your skin.

.

You pass out during a run around campus, but it's so early no one notices before you come to again. You feel like your body isn't going to be able to move at all, but it's different from the months you spent in your wheelchair: The clouds are these atmospheric haunt, and the scar from the cigarette burn on your hip is a mirror of the pitted sky.

.

You tell Spencer one night after you've had a few gin and tonics together that you've not been eating, that you passed out, that you've been purging. She's calm and she kisses you.

You're drunk but you swear she looks thinner too: You are wearing everyone thin.

.

You twist your hands; you bring up eating in therapy. You are certain that you do not deserve sustenance, and you are also slightly certain that you would rather not exist, so that may be why.

You've already been diagnosed with cyclothymia, and two days later you have a hallucination in your dorm showers—your brain tells you you're in a bomb shelter during World War II, and once it breaks, you find yourself cowering on the floor of the shower, the knuckles of your right hand bloody from punching the wall.

You tell Spencer entirely ashamedly the next morning.

She cares for your raw knuckles and stays the night later on. She seems scared to go to sleep.

.

You're officially diagnosed with Bipolar I Disorder, and you cannot feel your hands.

.

Your brain gets more tangled: Things get worse before they get better. You take a knife and cut precisely along the vein of your left arm in the middle of the night when you can't sleep, and it's not nearly deep enough to do anything but ache.

.

You're not quite sure when you became this person, but you do not understand the way the world is moving underneath your feet, the way the sun burns you. You spend a few nights on the roof of the library.

When Spencer tells you that you can get better, you don't know how to say that you _can't _believe her: There are bombs going off inside of your head.

.

The first mood stabilizer you get put on doesn't work. You are in the middle of a mixed episode at the end of your junior year, consistently drunk, consistently purging, consistently self-harming in any ways you can think of.

Remarkably—and your brain is _remarkable_—you manage to keep up in classes just fine, even though you miss a fair amount of them. You are still very much sustained by poetry, you just wish yours had less blood in it.

You tell Spencer multiple times that you want to die because it hurts too much, because you're tired. She tells you she loves you very much; she begs you to keep fighting.

You continue to ask more of Spencer—to _stay_—because you cannot ask it of yourself.

.

One day while purging you scrape the back of your throat with your fingernail on accident. You don't think much of it until two nights later when your throat swells up so much you can't breathe, and Spencer has to take you to the Emergency Room.

You get antibiotics and four stitches because the scrape had opened and become infected, and you would be mortified if you had the energy.

.

You overdose one night on a bottle of Vicodin you have for your back. You take as many pills as you can after seventeen shots of vodka, and you call Spencer.

She's at your dorm before you realize what's happening, and when you wake up in the morning, your body an entire ache, you can tell she's been crying, that she hasn't slept.

You have no idea how to apologize for something like this: She lays her head against your chest and you want the spaces between ventricles to serve as words you do not know.

.

You do not try to get better so much as you try to stay.

Spencer is not made of only bone and beg, and before she leaves for the summer you know it's going to end. You don't eat for thirty-seven hours; you bruise your legs so painfully by hitting them over and over again with a Yale coffee mug, with your fists.

You kiss her and you want to say that you're sorry for everything, for being selfish, for having such skeleton love for her, for too many words. She has been angry at you for far too long, for not being able to heal, for not being able to try harder, to stop the breaking. You are both so tired of yourself.

At the airport, your goodbye—you say, This morning I love you like salt.

.

You've stopped weighing yourself but during your summer poetry program at Brown, Rachel comes up from New York to visit for a weekend and her eyes grow large when she sees you. You've resolved yourself to not noticing; you've resolved yourself to fighting through days; you wear mostly long chiffon skirts expensive scarves and slouching t-shirts and university sweatshirts and leggings, and you're pretty enough that no one says anything. You're remarkably gifted academically—even with everything you've dealt with and even at Yale, you stand out—so you know you have anorexia and dysmorphia; you're just really great at lying to yourself about so many things.

But Rachel has seen—_seen_—you for years, and she quietly suggests you see a nutritionist one morning when you order only a latte for breakfast.

Her eyes are so kind, so patient, that you agree.

.

Sitting outside of the nutritionist's office at Brown's Student Health Center, you're sure you look absolutely miserable and like you're about to cry. You _are_ absolutely miserable and on the edge of tears.

The nutritionist, however, turns out to be absolutely wonderful, and she speaks for an hour with you about setting small goals, about beginning recovery, about foods you love.

When you leave, you feel remarkably lighter, and this paradox makes you smile.

.

In July, you get put on a different mood stabilizer, and a slightly higher dose. All of a sudden the thunderstorms all over your brain are simply small rainstorms, and you cannot believe what the world looks like. You are in love with this new slice of universe, this inexplicably good thing, and you're able to feel everything but you are able to understand the way hills turn blue as the sun sets, the way fog burns off in the middle of the day, the way your scars are just fractions of your skin.

.

You take some time to yourself. You stay in touch with Rachel, visit quite often once the semester begins, and she's grown in these two years. You have coffee with Spencer multiple times, and you spend hours in the corner of the library with her some Saturdays, but you have made it clear to yourself that you need to fill out all of the pebbles of your love before you try to give it away to anyone else.

You take a full semester to spend alone in your new big bed in your new apartment. You take up cooking as a hobby primarily because you're trying to develop a better relationship with food as part of recovery, but you find that you love it: all of the heat, the precise slices, motions of flavors in the smoke, oils, seeping of texture. You practice for a few months before you make Rachel blackened tofu and sauteed vegetables with a peanut sauce, and she closes her eyes and then opens them to stare at you, then starts to laugh, asks how someone with as amazing cooking abilities as you ever missed out on food. You smile. And for as much as you adore your successes, you also like your failures at combinations: They make you laugh rather than cry, and you always have eggs and toast as a backup in case.

.

You have to have back surgery in November. It's a pain and you'd rather not, and there's something that rocks this receding thing stitched into your throat: You haven't had a new scar since June.

Santana and your mom are there the first time you see it, and it's only a few inches long between the dimples above the backs of your hips.

Santana rolls her eyes when your bottom lip starts to tremble, and she slaps your ass so hard you're shocked into laughter.

.

Your mood stabilizer continues to work at your current dose. You don't gain back much of the weight you've lost over the past few years, and your bones are constantly at this noticeable press against your skin. But you start swimming more, valuing the rhythm and the soothing flight of your body _reaching_.

As a poet you are beginning to become at peace with the futility of words at explaining what you have been through; you have a lifetime of apologies to make.

You start by baking Spencer a pie. It seems ridiculous but who doesn't love pie? and how else can you even _begin_ to become someone who loves well. Your pie is ornate—Frannie had given you tons of her old tools from Williams & Sonoma—and when you try the filling, you smile: It is rich and so sweet and nothing at all like before.

When you show up at 8 am at her dorm, pie in hand, Spencer laughs at you and rolls her eyes, but she moans when she tries a piece, flicks some filling onto your nose, and then gives you a long, tight hug.

.

When you go home to Lima for a few days to visit Santana's family, you are full. You've applied for multiple prestigious scholarships to go abroad; your theses are almost finished.

You feel overwhelmed on New Year Eve, in the midst of your family and friends. The whir of colors and laughter makes you want to cry in this completely full way, so you sneak out of Rachel's window onto the roof to process just a little of your full brain. It is almost too profound a thing to live with: Despite wanting to be dead for what feels like an entirely different lifetime, you are living. You are bone pump skin creak jut pit all soft scar.

Rachel comes to find you, and you get lost in smoke and stars, breath floating in the cold, and you kiss Rachel because you have nothing better to say.

You breathe warm onto your sutured hands: They are so far from numb.


End file.
